Speak No Evil

by Uzodinma Iweala

For the Greeks, pleasure derived from submission to passion, and passion appeared in many forms. Desire had no right. No wrong. It simply was, she said.

The white kids used to touch me all the time when I was younger, like they owned me. They’d call me Velcro Head and press things to my hair to see what would stick. I let them play around because there were always more of them than me and because back then I didn’t know the difference between ignorance and malice.

I’m late, the kind of late that suggests I have no regard for the emotional health of my Nigerian parents who probably think I’ve been kidnapped by the enemies of progress.

My father doesn’t understand the desire to “hang out.” What are you “hanging” from, my friend, he says. Do you think that Apple man made his money by hanging out, talkless of Bill Gates.

Niru you are irresponsible. You are careless. You this boy! You don’t think. Jesus! My father will shout in a tone that makes you feel like the whole world is disappointed by your birth.

Sometimes I wonder how my parents found each other. They are so different, like matter and antimatter, and I don’t know that their marriage won’t zap itself into oblivion.

I want so many things, so many competing things. I want to run to win, to run away from myself, to run away from home.

She still keeps a tiny picture of my sister in her wallet. I know because I saw it once when she emptied her handbag on the table as she searched for her car keys. She quickly snatched it up from under a pile of credit cards and lipstick tubes when my hand reached towards it. I’ve heard her say, it can’t happen to me again, when she stands outside my room. Lightning cannot strike twice.

I have no desire to be here, but I also know there are battles that you fight to fight and battles that you fight to win, and refusing to get on the plane was not going to do anyone any good.

If you can do nothing else, at least look decent, my father likes to say. He also says, there is no decency in Nigeria.

We live such different lives with such different worries. Who has time to think about sexual orientation when there is no food to eat, no money for school fees, no doctor in sight when you get sick.

But I didn’t choose my life any more than the boys beneath the mango trees chose theirs, any more than my father chose his.

Sometimes it seems like he just wants to punish someone, anyone, for a long list of grievances that he has never made clear, which you can never ask about because he keeps his emotions so guarded that any question would be interpreted as an assault.

I wonder if dragging us to this village and the nearby town where he spent his childhood is a way of sinking us all into his own personal hell so that we can see how this strange combination of poverty and opportunity, these broken and muddy roads, these crumbling houses, these overburdened men and women walking slowly in these streets singing praise songs to keep themselves going, created the strange combination of love and anger and pride and fear that is my father.

With OJ or my mother in the car, he pointed out all the things he would make right if only he had the power. With me now, he says nothing. Occasionally he turns to look at me with the same expression that occupies his face when he has to solve a problem at the office.

People should know when they are conquered, OJ used to say when he would pin me to the floor and tickle me until I couldn’t tell whether I was laughing or crying. There is nothing you can do, give it up, it’s easier that way, OJ would say. You can’t win, so just let go, he said once when I said I wanted to punch my father in the face.

The idea that I had the potential to wound and destroy inside my body was overwhelming. It unfolded faster than rational thought, underneath a heavy sky and the Cathedral high above. The other boy had an expression of total surprise and anticipation that second before my fist hit his face. That was real power. That is the kind of power that my father understands. What scares me is that he might even appreciate it if I tried to punch his face.

He operates by the doctrine, kill your problems dead so they can’t bother you anymore. Sometimes this means violence, sometimes charm, sometimes prayer.

Penance takes different forms, Reverend Olumide says, and I want my mother to feel sorry. You could have prevented this I want to shout at her but instead I let her wash the dishes because I know she doesn’t like to.

On the bad days, there is no color. I know there are colors. I can see the colors, but the world looks gray.

have been in locker rooms before and I have been in this locker room before with these same people, but of course now it’s different, just as everything has been different since the blizzard. You cannot unsee what has been seen once the veil is lifted, Reverend Olumide says in church. We cannot return to the garden of Eden.

You’re not like these white children, my mother says, so don’t go and follow their foolishness. But according to my father I am already foolish, irredeemably foolish.

I look at these kids laughing with each other, standing without jackets like even the cold can’t touch them and I don’t understand why there are people for whom rules and norms are fully optional, for whom foolishness is celebrated.

Let’s eat, Adam says. Snooze you lose, sweater girl says and the other girl grabs my hand with her soft hands and leads me to the light. You don’t want to lose. No I don’t, I don’t want to lose but I am lost already

I have found more fist bumps and handshakes and high fives until someone shouts, wassup my nigga, because drunk white kids think imitating black people is hilarious.

Her freckled skin makes me angry, so angry and my stomach turns as the white boys downstairs fuck up some commas, laughing at black boys like me but with bad grammar.

My face burns, and my lips burn. I touch two fingers to the flow and then to my lips. The rich man begged God from hell to let Lazarus slake his thirst with just two drops but God said certain torments are eternal.

You are not like these white children, my mother says except on my palms that turn pink like their skin turns pink, but only when hurt, or scared or stressed.

I’ll get you an Uber. You don’t have to. Oh I do, you’re a hot mess. I’m so sorry. No problem, we’ve all been there. But have we?

Each time I pass, I tell myself that tomorrow I will stop, but when tomorrow comes I don’t stop because I’m scared. The devil always comes in fragments until you experience eternity in its consuming entirety, Reverend Olumide says.

Your parents know, I say, the first thing I have said since ordering a glass of lemonade now drained on the counter before me. I play with my straw and stir my melting ice cubes until there is enough water to drink. Again my mouth feels dry. Damien shakes his head. Does it matter, he says. I’m not there. Maybe I’ll never go back. But you’ll have to go back at some point. We all have to die at some point, he says. So what’s your point? I’ll deal with that when it’s time.

Sometimes I stare at the family that owns me and I wish I were a different person, with white skin and the ability to tell my mother and my father, especially my father, to fuck off without consequence,

You think too much, and it makes you feel alone, he says. We’re different, I can’t not think and I’m nowhere near as strong as you, I say.

can’t just tell my parents, my friends, everybody to go away. What’s left for me? Damien says, the world. His face is insistent. You’re stronger than you think, he says with eyes wide and full of light, his brow arched and his lips pressed together.

A kiss is the ultimate uncanny, Ms. McConnell said in class after we read The Passion. Simple and pure, driven by lust, a separation that knows no boundaries. You are not fully yourself and yet you are totally self-aware.

Sin is a slippery slope, Reverend Olumide says to me when I see him next. My hand goes to my lips because I think he knows.

Well go on and run then, go on and run, but me, I won’t be nobody’s sickness.

I’m not doing anything wrong, Damien shouts at me, I’m not, so fuck you if you want to be this way. Just fuck you.

might be if she weren’t married to my father. Everyone around him seems that much less free-spirited, that much less open to possibility, so much more controlled.

My parents do not say things like I’m proud of you or I love you often—my mother more than my father, which is still almost never. They show their love by paying our tuitions, OJ says, and by putting food on the table. They show they are proud by demanding even more than you think you can do.

OJ says our father lives somewhere between the self-satisfaction that his success has made us soft and disgust that we are unacquainted with the brutal intensity of a world that he has effectively tamed for us.

Ms. McConnell lives in Los Angeles now and writes for television. I wonder if she’s happier there or just less oppressed.

Sometimes it is better to go to the world than to bring the world to you.

I shout and I shout everything I have heard said by people to people with too much pain. It will be okay, you’ll get through this, this too shall pass, the last phrase being something a mom likes to mutter. The neighbors, I plead. His eyes say, fuck your neighbors, but then they say something much more terrifying, they say nothing at all.

It hurts even if nature always wins in the end. It hurts because loving someone is very often against your will at first and there is no amount of will that can change the situation before me.

I am always someone’s accessory, someone’s afterthought, the supporting actress in another person’s drama and that thought fills me with fire.

There is a half-moon of bystanders around us now, waiting for something to happen so they can tell each other, remember that time when—he was like six four—dude, he looked like he just got out of prison—total thug—complete felon—yeah.

Those who forget are often forgotten, Mom would say to me in the multiple text messages she used to send to make certain that one thing or another was completed at the house.

With death, there is no next time.

In his most frustrated moments my boyfriend says I think of myself too much. I don’t disagree. I tell him that’s what happens when you date a younger woman and he is quiet.