Lagoon

by Nnedi Okorafor

Welcome to Lagos, Nigeria. The city takes its name from the Portuguese word for “lagoon”. The Portuguese first landed on Lagos Island in the year 1472. Apparently, they could not come up with a more creative name. Nor did they think to ask one of the natives for suggestions. And so the world turns, masked by millions of names, guises, and shifting stories. It’s been a beautiful thing to watch. My designs grow complicated.

She is on a mission. She is angry. She will succeed and then they will leave for good. They brought the stench of dryness, then they brought the noise and made the world bleed black ooze that left poison rainbows on the water’s surface. She often sees these rainbows whenever she leaps over the water to touch the sun. Inhaling them stings and burns her gills.

She remembers her last form, a yellow monkey; even while in that body, she loved to swim. The water has always called to her. All goes black.

Clean, sweet, sweet, sweet!

Everything is changing.

The color that reminds her of another life when she could both enjoy the water and endure the sun and air.

old. The last thing she requests is to be three times her size and twice her weight. They make it so. Now she is no longer a great swordfish. She is a monster.

Despite the FPSO Mystras’s loading hose leaking crude oil, the ocean water just outside Lagos, Nigeria, is now so clean that a cup of its salty-sweet goodness will heal the worst human illnesses and cause a hundred more illnesses not yet known to humankind. It is more alive than it has been in centuries and it is teeming with aliens and monsters.

In many ways, Bar Beach was a perfect sample of Nigerian society. It was a place of mixing. The ocean mixed with the land and the wealthy mixed with the poor.

On 12 June 1993, the day of the most democratic election in Nigeria’s history, she’d come here with her father and watched him shed tears of joy. On 23 June, her mother brought her here because her father and uncles were at home cursing and shouting over the military annulling those same elections.

Powers That Be

And now Adaora was here at Bar Beach because her loving perfect husband of ten years had hit her. Slapped her really hard. All because of a hip-hop concert and a priest. At first, she’d stood there stunned and hurt, cupping her cheek, praying the children hadn’t heard. Then she’d brought her hand up and slapped him right back.

“But don’t call me Anthony Dey Craze. I’m just out for a post-concert stroll. Tonight, just call me Edgar.”

But something was happening to the ocean. The waves were roiling irregularly. Each time the waves broke on the beach, they reached further and further up the sand. Then a four-foot wave rose up. Adaora was so fascinated that she just stood there staring. Anthony stopped pulling her and pushing the military man. Blood ran into Agu’s eyes as he tried to focus his gaze on the darkness of the water. The wave was heading right for them. Fast and quiet as a whisper. It was closer to ten feet tall now. Finally, the three of them turned and ran. The fist of water was faster.

Aman iman, Adaora weakly thought. The phrase meant “water is life” in the Tuareg language of Tamashek.

Only two people on the beach witnessed the watery abduction of Adaora and the two men. One was a young boy.

By then it had become a naked dark-skinned African woman with long black braids. She reminded the boy of a woman whose purse he’d once stolen.

Then came the wave that looked like the hand of a powerful water spirit. The boy saw it take the three people, one who was a woman and two who were men. And just before it did, he saw one of those people throw a black bird into the air that caught itself and flew into the night.

And she, too, thought the word “smoke”, but she also thought “shape-shifter”.

Just before it happened, one of them had released something black and evil into the air like a poison.

“I won’t,” it said. Adaora squinted at it in the flickering light . . . no, not “it”, “her”.

The woman looked like someone from Adaora’s family – dark-skinned, broad-nosed, with dark brown thick lips. Her bushy hair was as long as Adaora’s, except where Adaora had many, many neat shoulder-length dreadlocks, this one had many, many neat brown braids that crept down her back.

“What’s done is done,” the woman said. “We are here. Now . . .” “Now you . . . you people should leave,” Adaora said, slurring her words. “No. We stay.”

There was something both attractive and repellent about the woman, and it addled Adaora’s senses.

Her mannerisms were too calm, fluid and . . . alien. Adaora’s husband Chris would instantly hate this woman for all of these reasons. To him, this woman would be a “marine witch”. Her husband believed there were white witches, physical witches and marine witches. All were evil, but the marine witch was the most powerful because she could harness water, the very substance that made up 70 per cent of an adult’s body and 75 per cent of a child’s. Water is life, she thought, yet again.

The woman paused and then smiled knowingly. “I like the name Miri?”

The name “Miri” would surely drive her husband that much more insane; it would be the icing on the cake.

Igbo word for “water”.

“Ayodele”

“Do you know what name I’m thinking of right now?” It . . . she smiled. “No.”

“You need a place to stay,” Adaora said. “Yes,” she said. “I would like that.” “Fine,” Adaora said, her voice hardening. “So you are Ayodele, then.”

They all went. Adaora, Anthony, Ayodele and Agu . . . Adaora knew the soldier’s name now. She knew plenty about both Anthony and Agu, and they knew plenty about her. Adaora drove.

If you were Agu, would you return to your barracks where you’d encounter your fellow soldiers who had just beaten you up after you tried to stop their assault of a woman? When your superior had threatened to send hired thugs to kill the only family you had? He did not wish to return to his barracks, not right away.

All three of them stayed together. All three of them were in. It was 9 January and approaching 1 a.m.

Of late, her husband avoided what he now called her ‘‘witch’s den’’ at all costs.

Adaora had been speechless. Back then, he’d loved her so much. But that was a long time ago. Before the children. Before the stress.

Every time she looked at her, there was a disorienting moment where she was not sure what she was seeing. It lasted no more than a half-second, but it was there. Then she was seeing Ayodele the “woman” again.

“Come here, Ayodele,” she said. “I . . . I’d like to take a skin sample.”

Anthony nodded. “You can change yourselves but you can change the fish, too, right?” “Precisely,” Ayodele said. “We give them whatever they want.” “Damn,” he said. Then he nodded with a small smile. “Respect.”

Again she pushed away crowding memories of what she’d witnessed under the sea. How she’d been floating and breathing beneath the water in whatever contraption they’d built down there on the reef-like structure. How one of them had touched her arm and she watched as it became coated with lovely iridescent fish scales and her fingers webbed together. How the sensation of the changing felt more like rigorous vibration than pain. How they’d known that that was what she wanted so that she could horrify her husband. How easily they’d changed her back. She squeezed her eyes shut. Focus, focus, focus, she thought.

“One thousand times!” Adaora whispered loudly, ignoring Agu. “That’s how strong the magnification is. She’s made of tiny, tiny, tiny, metal-like balls.

“Much of the world’s most famous extraterrestrial material, mainly meteorites, has fallen right here. In Nigeria.” She was speaking more to herself now. “Last year a big one fell in Tarkwa Bay. I was testing the water for pollution when it happened . . .” She started looking around.

“But what did you do?” Adaora asked now. “Why are they coming after your family?” Agu looked at her with his fully open eye and squinted with his swollen right one. “I tried to stop one of my own ahoa from raping a woman.”

“They can be anything and are nothing,” she said, as she wrote. “Basically, she’s a shape-shifter.” She smiled. “I wish my grandmother were alive to see this.”

“CHRIS!” Ayodele said. Her voice was identical to Chris’s, as was her physique. Not only did she look like him, she was even wearing the same wrinkled shorts and singlet.

“You’ve poisoned me! Witch! I knew it! I am hallucinating because you’ve poisoned my body, o!”

“Marine witch, o!” he wailed, pointing and pointing at her. “Amusu! I knew it! I knew it! Jesus Christ will send you back to hell, o! God will punish you! In the name of Jesus and the Holy Spirit!” He turned and fled up the stairs.

“Your husband?” Agu asked, as he dabbed the cut on his forehead with his fingers. It had started bleeding again. “He works too hard and he’s been fasting,” she said. “It makes him a little . . .” “That man does not love you,” Anthony muttered. Silence. “You people are very interesting,” Ayodele said, smiling.

Since he’d begun fasting, he had to admit, he just hadn’t felt right. He knew it was the witchcraft his wife had worked on him rebelling against his cleansing efforts. He had to keep fasting. Eventually it would all get better, he’d be free of her grasp and he’d be back in control of his life and his wife. Maybe.

On both sides of the wall were tiny houses where most likely ten times as many people lived. Poor people. These homes were surrounded by walls, too, though the walls were really just the walls of the much larger home boxing them in. Lagos is like a big zoo, Chris thought to himself. Everyone is contained by lots of walls and lots of gates, whether you like it or not. It’s secure but there is no security.