Time once blew against our march to adulthood, now it stands so still we have to carry it. Chuba huffs ahead, face redder than fanned coal, shoulders slack, past strands that streak dew on our shirts, past the silence ruffled by desertion. A strip of cloud shadows us like we’re sheep grazing astray, munching farther and farther away from the shepherd’s bell, shades our dizzy, dry-mouthed hunt for the last portal. We tread faded grass and gnats ticking around the mountain’s base, a thing like panic beating against our skulls. We have been snuffed in twos and threes, often while adrift on the still waves of our beds. We have been called from our bodies with no blood or sign of struggle. Aturo wove past the lowest branch of a dream and never returned, hard as we cried for him, flapping our arms and running in circles. So we forged the wails back in our mouths and gulped them whole, lest sleep should stir from its feast of souls and swoop to us in our exhaustion. We have swung lethal blows at one another, gut-runners that had us seesawing from the boundary of uneasy rest back to life. We have downed uppers and pricked thorns in our scalp and drilled nails in our heels and palms. We have knelt, looking to heaven in silent plea, our eyes off-white with mania, unsleep creased around them.
Every survivor has a trick for evading sleep.
Chuba drinks so much water he can drown just by lying back, choke on the ocean in his chest. Hafiz loops a Grateful Dead at full blast and lays his grimy locks, his vacant stare, on the roaring. I wield a weeks-old, wormed-out carcass stink. It cottons up my nostrils before I can drift away and creeps in my tired eyes and stings them awake. Up to nightfall, flies hive after me and claim my nudity in patches.
By these and other ploys too numerous to mention, we have been awake five days and hope to survive one more, this day. We can, of course, quit even now, toward the end of the final lap, in sight of the ribbon, as some have, and fall from the stations of our birth, reverse all the progress our parents have made, join the teeming underclass, be confined to grueling, low paid jobs for the rest of our lives—but Hafiz wants his name carved on a marble plaque in a corner office uptown, from where, coffee in hand, he will someday watch trucks growl past, cabs beetle by a spotless sidewalk, lovers picnic in a park, and realize he is free from lack. Chuba knows where he will intern on Wall Street: in a secluded, unheard-of avenue there, a tiny trading firm with “and sons” in the title that quietly brokers warfare. I would love to paint empty fields at sunset and pawn each scene off at a street corner for board and the day’s meal, but as the only child of wage slaves my dreams must be sensible (flow around joy and desire towards profit). So what that I spent my formative years crushing crayons and dripping dye on every surface, in spry repetitions the adults mistook for a tick—but could have been wisdom whispered from another reality? So what that I would wake and stare, mouth agape, into the wee hours, at a watery reproduction of Goya’s The Dog over my crib? In the confusion of birthing, even before she saw me and pressed me to her chest and kissed the scurf on my head, my mother must have enrolled me for the wet year I have had at Payslip Prep, with Pa’s full consent. You want a reason for our being here, why we began this race that erases our minds and bodies, why we run run run like bank robbers or spree killers at the wowing of a cop wagon, look no further than a generation of office geckos, briefcase-holders, spreadsheeters, fucking Bob and Sue from accounting, who bowed deep before Mammon and nudged their squealing newborn his way: To do with as you like.
***
Our parents say, “There was a time before sleep, you wouldn’t know this by how much we sleep as a country today—and since this country started getting up at seven, eight (or even, God forbid, nine), things haven’t quite been the same.” Our parents say, “I’ll give you three reasons why sleep is a problem, you who insist on seven hours of nothing every day: Railway, sugar, cotton. Can you guess where this is going?” They shout above our protests, “Name one invention that would have been possible if we slept our senses off, if like you we woke unsure where we were, and needed countless deep breaths to realize, ‘Oh, bed. House. Bed.’ Light? Brought by sleepless hordes in Appalachia, underground cities of miners who hadn’t so much as winked in months. Oil. Found under snoring field owners by an alarm clock detester. Which alarm clock detester? Not important. Why argue when you can be quiet? Listen. Antibiotics. You have frayed nerves and exhaustion bundled into a lab coat to thank for that. The internet? Discovered in a haze of insomnia. I see you’re looking it up. Which is cool. But can you doubt us later? We’re not done talking, put the phone away. Baby making? Well, since you ask … requires owlish hours. We moaned way past bedtime to get you here. Unmake that face. With any luck, you too will have blinkless nights filled with awkward moaning. Sleeping pills. Come. On. Only an underslept mind could have concocted those. You’re not even trying! Hordes have had to stay awake so you can sleep a little longer, admit it.” They say, “Picture this: every day, in the long march towards progress and innovation, you spill on the ground and can’t be shaken awake. The upright have to march around you, this puddle with a brain. Did you know the source of all suffering, hopelessness, financial loss, ergo layoffs, ergo workplace malaise, ergo unionism, and then, economic downturn, is your harmless habit of nodding off?”
We say nothing.
We stand and try again.
We run.
It shouldn’t puzzle anyone, the final test: beat sleep; that the right sort of employers request a signed statement that [applicant] completed the final test at first attempt before they skim your resume; that we’d risk heart and soul to crush it. Our tutor in How Corporations Can Optimize Their Human Assets claims an employer (who is not your father, or father’s best friend) will paper plane your C.V. if this is missing, swipe the drip from their whiskeys and Coke Zeros with your credentials. More than your smarts, your hard work and willingness to get along with others, employers today want you awake. Payslip has replaced the PowerPoint or time sheet or inventory we would be filling through burning eyes and a grade four headache with tests of balance and treasure hunts. If we can endure the latter at the end of our wits, no amount of paperwork will bury us, seems to be the idea.
An intercom embedded in the landscape, sunken in sky and sand, crackles on: “Good job, Chuba. Good fucking job. Come on.” This is the invigilator’s first utterance in days, since she mocked Hafiz for crying and begged him to quit. “Fall off the ladder, you’ll fit right in the crowd below, among other browns,” she’d said. Slurring now, heaving up words she’s gulped too long, she indicts Chuba: “I chose you to lead because I thought you’d lead with empathy, from the rear, but you’re competing with your guys. You’re making them look like moss. Good job.”
Ahead of us in the shadow of the mountain, Chuba swings around and stiffens as though with a retort. No, no, no, our eyes beg him. For in this test she’s also management, our employer, who can fire at will, for no reason at all, let alone a misspent word. We lean on Chuba, press our frailty to him, sighing, and his bullish huffs ease, and his shoulders slacken.
The invigilator cackles. “You have thirty minutes left.”
***
He squats to a row of scribbles in the rock, trails his fingers along the symbols as lightly as if one might prick him. He wilts moments from sleep. His eyes restart, his words come choked and vehement, nearly defeated by a growing numbness: “It’s in Arabic. ‘Meeting Room.’ Except there’s no door.” A glowing outline no wider than the span of his shoulders cuts through folds in the rock, the stone crumbles, and moths spiral out of the damp. We gag and weep and sniff until the cloud of wings subsides. A goat so black it could be blue hoofs out of the gloom, wagging its swollen rump, buckles on its fore-knees and half-closes its eyes. A line of blood froths out of its lips and crawls to its chin. “Fuck this, I quit,” Chuba says. The goat flops in a flurry of limbs, head jerking left-right-left-right as if struck repeatedly with a rock. Hafiz wilts so close to the ground, almost kissing his shadow, his lids shut tight, hair awash in the wind: Chuba hooks a finger down his collar and rights him.
A voice claps through the ruins and up my spine: “Y’all never seen a lamb die? Twenty minutes.”
I unhinge my jaw, but clear slime, not the yell I’d intended, pours from the cave behind my tongue, streams of it fall to my neck and wet … feathers. A faint quill quivers from each pore. I graze my hands across my body, reach behind, to the top of my spine, as if to unzip my skin and step out of it, and squirm for the fluff along my length, the explosion of feathers everywhere, between my legs, soft white in the whorls of my ears, damp spikes over my knuckles. Nothing sprouts on my face beyond the faint brows, the tired, wide-apart clumps of moustache. “Do I look different?” I ask Chuba.
He takes me in with a tight smile. “I see you all right,” he says.
Not good.
“What do you see?”
Chuba looks away. “It’s temporary.”
I flap up a storm in which he staggers, strains, and flashes his palms like one staring down the nozzle of a gun and calls, “Choo-choo. Choo-choo.” I cock my head and flutter the muscles in my throat; the sound is of rocks racing down a slope. “You’re still you,” Chuba says. “I see Stanley. I see my friend.” He flies at me before I can leap away and locks me in an embrace. “You’re still you.” The wilderness whooshes on its side. He has toppled me and is gathering my wings, kneeling on their heft. Drops dive from his nose and quiver along his chin as he worries at my form. The wrinkles in his forehead stack up to a realization that he can’t grasp the squeaks and grunts still so new to me; that my panicked cries have been mistaken for a tribal chant. He falls off but leaves a jittery hand on my back. “Hafiz, you see Stanley, don’t you?” he asks.
Hafiz pops one eye, levels it at me, and gives a thumbs up.
Forge ahead, I continue clucking, but he pets more feathers loose, kisses my nape, and whispers, “This is called stress. It will pass.” I relax, in spite of my wariness. I puddle in the dust.
The megaphone snaps on. “Congratulations Chuba. You just passed the test.”
Chuba jolts away from me as canned applause pours on the landscape, faceless cheers and whistles and hoorahs; someone takes the volume down a notch. “Your future self is all but guaranteed a mortgage, health insurance, social security, 401(k), some fucking respect attached to his name. At last. How does this make you feel?”
Chuba shudders, squeezes his eyes shut. “Oh, so alive.” His voice is tiny, the tone ragged, like he’s rung up room service for extra sheets. “Will somebody help us? Help—”
I squawk: You said I would be fine.
“—my friend. A small stress yet threatens to swallow him.” And despite the burning in my marrow, the pins in my joints and lungs, I believed it, shaped my mind to his, lived through his will. If Chuba said I was fine how could my body know pain, or dread, or thirst? Why do nerves now gather, glowing, around vague aches?
Chuba cups a hand to the storm in my chest.
Like you, I once asked my parents if they even loved each other, how their hearts could not just meet but fuse and stay that way, beating harder with time. My father grunted: Ask again when I’m dead—as if to say, keep probing and the illusion will shatter. “He never proposed, he just showed me pictures of our first home,” my mother replied. “He was quite stable. I could depend on him.”
From the future my son and daughter monitor this race as well as their mother’s, for whom these days finals is every bit as brutal, whose love I haven’t felt and won’t ever feel unless I “measure up,” score a stable job, decent income, enough for vacations and private tutors, the local boat club, the country club. The kids whoop at every hurdle we scale, every puzzle we unravel, every challenge we surmount, and mope, arms folded tight, when we stumble, as if we bear their futures on our shoulders and they can’t believe we would be so careless.
I reach past the pain. I reclaim my body. I force it to stand, take a step. Gray strands reach from the gap and dissolve against my face, and the slurp and burble and crash of foam against sand, somewhere below. “It will never end,” Chuba says through tears; “the race. I should’ve never run it. Stay.”
I scoff. “And do what?”
“Absolutely nothing. Just … pause.” Chuba sniffs, knuckles away snot.
“Easy for you to say.”
“You’re human again.”
I startle, feel my face, chest, limbs.
“And I can hear you. The stress is gone.”
“Huh. Just as I was getting used to it.” I squint through a thought. “Do you know any boy who wants to be a painter, apart from me?”
Chuba sways, jaw agape. “Well …”
“That’s why I’ll finish this round.”
“I’ve taken orders since I was two, could understand them. Done everything expected of me, no questions asked.” Chuba shifts, drops his gaze. “Wanna know what I think?”
The megaphone clicks: “Eight minutes!”
“Most jobs will be gone by the time we graduate college.”
I stare him down. “Ha!”
“You may as well do what moves you.”
I still myself against a wave of panic. “If jobs do not exist neither will my wife and kids.”
Chuba knuckles the final trail from his face, huffs and stands taller. “Someone will love you as you are.”
“Who? Don’t say my parents.”
“Someone.” He stares.
A vein over my heart knots and unknots itself. “No.”
“No?”
“I won’t stay.”
I raise a hand to quiet him, to say that it was a drunken misstep, and it happened so long ago, and how come he hadn’t woken from that night.
“I’ll wait for you.”
“Urgh. Stop.”
Chuba’s stare glazes over. “All right.” He nibbles a knot in his cheek, again and again, now backs away, shoulders drooped, into a tunnel of his mind.
Hafiz zips past me.
“Later, bro.” I do a little fist pump.
“Yeah, yeah. Bro.”
The cave belches heat in my eyes and salt through my hair. I squint for Hafiz, huffing; and the dark shallows, thins to a starless predawn, the grime at the bottom of a discarded cup. Soon a ray quivers at the heart of it, almost birthed by my focus, sweeps the sea of the dust in the void, alights on me. I howl and reach for Chuba, for the light is heavier than if cast over centuries and teethes through skin, gnawing a stigmata dead center of my chest, now my palm, raised as a shield, and hastily put away. It latches before I can spell fuck, leaps along with me, left-right, left-up, right-down, turns feral and flings my fingers away when I make to nurse the burn, chews to my back but stops short of the spine. While Chuba watches, hands in his pockets.
“Four minutes!”
I roar. I recollect myself from a jumbled heap and face the pall again. Another beam opens at its heart, two hemispheres away, a flicker of eternity, pulsing. I scuttle forward. A plank stretches from outer dark, before my toes, to the light, thin as the innermost strand in a web, so thin I must tread it one foot in front of the other, arms outspread, chin up. Hafiz tightropes its wobble, years ahead of me, over an unfathomable depth, bobs in and out of the beam when I climb on. We tense. We wait for the plank to still. It bounces harder, over the bluest stream, teasing the grips of our soles from its surface. I crouch, throw out my arms and suck in my belly and edge along, almost hear the restless flick of tails, fins slicing the roaring wilderness below, ripples caught between teeth like tusks, trailing from either side of blood-red mouths. I lean sideways, for the plank tilts, our toes slide off its dust. Hafiz falls and latches onto it, tenses his body to it before it can throw him off. I wheel my arms over the trampoline motion, for balance, but lose footing and straddle it with a howl. More splinters in the wood snap, and its middle dips, barely. My whimper ripples down and scrapes the skin of the pool, and loss mists out of the disturbance, springs a sweet stink in our faces.
I lie forward, flatten myself to the wood. Fiery points open in the deep end, blink, blink, blink, miles below. Eyes spilled all over the ocean floor, bright and tiny and fleeting as silver from a plundered chest. My breath quickens as it all dims, this bounty. I look ahead, still my trembling, and worm toward the light.
Tobenna Nwosu has explored moral conflict, climate change, world politics, and the legacies of colonialism from a position of Otherness, for magazines in the U.K. and U.S.
Image: cuhdra, morguefile.com
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Heavy Feather Review 