“What am I?” he whispered. He looked at his arms. They were wrapped in shadow. His hands were the size of dinner plates and strong enough to crush rocks to dust. He heard himself breathing heavily, his mouth open. He sounded like an elephant. He stopped and touched his chest. He felt mangled flesh there, and wetness, though he could not see blood due to his body’s darkness. This was nothing like what he’d imagined being a superhero would be like. If he’d killed someone, he was no better than the Chief of Chiefs. He was worse. A monster.
On the other side of the street he saw the akara lady, sitting at her stall, frying fresh akara over a flame. If she was out, it couldn’t be really late at night. She usually went in around eleven. Her pot was empty. She was frying up her last batch of akara. She looked up at him as he passed on the other side of the one-way street. He could hear her gasp and her heart rate quicken. The akara lady stared at him and lifted a tentative hand, either a greeting or signaling him to stop. He kept running.
He scrambled up and over the wall in the back of the house, easily scaling the sharp glass and barbed wire. As he approached his window he slowed down. If Never Die was dead, he would never commit a crime again. So why wasn’t Nnamdi changing back? By the time he got to his window, he was shuddering with panic. He could not let his mother see him like this. A violent monster. She’d think he’d come to rob or kill her. Regardless, at his size, he couldn’t even fit through the window. He sat down in the grass in front of the window and leaned against the wall.
He might have killed a man tonight. He had not controlled his power. He hadn’t just been angry. In the jumble of anger, outrage, and shock, he’d been consumed by rage. He could blame no one but himself for what he’d done. He crept to the garden. Maybe there he would calm down and shift back to himself. Maybe his father would even appear or at least speak to him. Maybe.
Nnamdi stood among his growing yams, tomatoes, onions, sunflower shoots, peppers, and herbs. The smell of this place would usually have soothed him. But in this state, his senses were heightened. The plants stank; the smells were too strong. The crickets and katydids sounded like sirens. There was a turkey in someone’s pen that was not sleeping soundly; he could hear it restlessly ruffling its feathers. He could hear all the people in the apartment building and houses next door breathing deeply, sleeping in their beds; their lives were not complicated and messed up, like his. Someone turned over and farted. Someone snorted. Someone sighed. Then his entire body seized up, accompanied by waves of rage that flowed like fire in the veins of his hands. He gritted and ground his teeth, hissing and moaning at the pain.
He held his breath and counted to ten, hoping it would stop. Then he erupted, grasping handfuls of onion stalks and yanking, tearing at the delicate sunflower stems, stomping on the tomatoes, kicking, clawing, ripping. Lastly, he mashed and mashed the yams into mush. He stormed to the half-closed window of his bedroom and put his fist right through it. CRASH!
“What was that!” he heard his mother shout. “Nnamdi?! Are you all right?”
Nnamdi looked from side to side, holding his painful fist. But no matter where he looked, he couldn’t focus, not with his eyes or his mind. His veins heated with burning rage again and he bit down on his tongue to stifle a scream. He tasted blood in his mouth as he heard his bedroom door opening. Can’t let her see me! he thought, running to the gate, nearly knocking over a sleep-weary Mr. Oke. He shoved the gate open and it banged hard on the wall. Nnamdi loped off into the night.
Dark Time of the Soul
HE FLED TO the one place where he had always found peace: the abandoned school down the road. He came here when he needed quiet. Abandoned long before he was born, the school was a forgotten place and thus a good place to go to forget. Chioma had told him that a young wealthy couple had returned to Nigeria from America with hopes of making things better in Kaleria. Sadly, they were set upon by Mama Go-Slow, Never Die, Three Days’ Journey, and several scammers. Within a year, the couple had abandoned their project and fled back to the United States, nearly broke.
The abandoned school had four thick concrete walls, a sturdy but unfinished roof, and several rooms. And all were covered with creeping vines. A nest of noisy weaverbirds sat in one of the corners. A lizard scurried across his foot. A few damaged desks had been left behind and plants had begun to grow into the glassless windows. Nnamdi looked at the wall near the back, where the phrase He who is afraid of doing too much always does too little was engraved into the cement in ornate writing. This sentence usually inspired him, but tonight it didn’t. The small flowerpot on the windowsill where Chioma had planted a mystery seed was still there and he resisted the urge to smash it.
Nnamdi groaned, staring up at the concrete ceiling and the night sky through the holes where it had collapsed. His belly was empty, his mind was clouded, his fists were clenched with fury, and his heart was heavy. He curled up in his corner, right there on the floor. In the darkness, he heard night creatures scurrying about. He felt mosquitoes trying to penetrate his skin and probably lapping up his leaking blood. He shivered, remembering the thick, meaty sound of his fist connecting with Never Die’s face. He whimpered and then his body clenched up with a hot wave of rage. What if I killed him? Nnamdi thought, closing his eyes. Isn’t how I thought it would be. I’m no hero.
Poor Nnamdi fell into a restless sleep.
* * *
Birds tweeted. Nnamdi opened his eyes to the leafy ceiling of the abandoned school. Outside, the bright sun shone. He looked at his hands. He looked at his body. He was still the Man. He was stuck. He pounded a fist on a desk and it cracked into three pieces.
He deserved this.
Nnamdi was a shadow. He stood over seven feet tall with superhuman strength, but he was nobody. His clothes, which disappeared when he was the Man and reappeared when he changed back, seemed to have disappeared for good. He could feel the wind directly on his skin. When he stepped into sunlight, it seemed to reject him; the sunlight would not touch his shadowy body. And then there was the rage pulsing through him like radioactive poison injected into his veins. It made it hard for him to think.
By the third day, Nnamdi had punched through one of the school walls with his fists, uprooted three large trees, and smashed all but one of the desks into pieces. He was dangerous and he knew it, so he only left the abandoned school when he couldn’t take the hunger any longer. When the sun set, he went begging, seeking out sellers who had stalls in the darkness.
There was only one seller who did not run away from him. She sold groundnuts and only frowned at his gruff, angry voice and hunched shadowy figure. “I’ve seen stranger things than you,” she told him. She gave him some of her leftovers and some of her remaining bags of “pure water” when it was late at night. He would quickly thank her and be off before she could muster up the nerve to ask him any questions. He’d eat the groundnuts in a few gulps, barely chewing, not tasting the food at all.
Was his mother looking for him? Did the newsletter run stories about him and how he was one of Kaleria’s latest missing children? Or even worse, did it run stories about how the Man had murdered somebody? He did not know what day it was. He barely remembered what it felt like to be the twelve-year-old boy that he had been. He’d lost his way and he wasn’t interested in finding it. The boy named Nnamdi retreated to a corner in his mind, where he curled up and let the darkness envelop him like the waters of a disastrous flood.