Do You Get The Feeling That Something Is Different

What if you could redo the false starts and missteps? And its just as easy as returning to a save point in the past? Could it be that easy?

The boy who swallows the past met her, taking shelter from the rain at the bus stop. He walked up and joined her.

“Hey, pretty,” he said. She was pretty, in a slightly cherubic way, with sharp nervy gestures. He liked her instantly.

“Good afternoon,” she said in that deferential but dismissive way girls respond to strangers they’d not like to talk with.

“Lousy rain,” he said. “Could have at least waited till nightfall.”

“Right?” she said.

And before he could say another word, along came another girl, conveniently slim and holding up a large umbrella. She called to her and ran out into the rain. She ducked under, and the boy watched the girls’ legs under the canopy swinging up the street. He was sure he liked her.

And he swallowed the past.

He met her, taking shelter from the rain at a bus stop. He had a large red-and-white umbrella. He walked up to her. “Are you waiting for a bus, or are you going this way?” He pointed up the street.

She hesitated for a moment. “I’m going to Golden Castle Lodge.”

“Myself, I stay at Amapiano. We are practically neighbors.” They walked under the umbrella, and to break the ice between them, he fired several questions at her to get to know her. Her name was Chinyere, she studied Mass Comm, read novels, was in her 1st year, and had lived in Nsukka. No, Mass Comm was not her first choice, law was. And so on. She answered so many questions, and she was quite warm when they parted at the door of her hostel.

“Do you get the feeling that something is different?” she asked him.

“What?”

“Nothing, really,” she said. “Just thinking out loud.”

“Can I have your number?” he asked. Back at his place, he called the number she had given him. The number you have dialed is not assigned to a customer.

And he swallowed the past.

He met her, taking shelter from the rain at a bus stop. He had a large red and white umbrella.

“Going my way?” he said.

“What?” she called through the rain.

“I said, are you going my way?” he yelled. “I’m going this way,” He pointed up the road.

She smiled and ran hunch-shouldered in the rain and came under his umbrella. “God bless you,” she said.

“Hey,” he said, “this girl. You did not clean your leg before getting into the car?”

She looked up at him.

“You tracked dirt into my car,” he said. “You should have stamped the mud under your shoes before entering.”

She laughed. “Sorry about it.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just close the door, let’s go.”

Laughing, she reached into the rain, made a grabbing motion, and swung an imaginary door close, and they started up the road. He held her hand as they crossed even though there was no oncoming car and no identifiable need to. It tickled her when he told her how much he bought his car, eleven thousand million uncountable.

“Look,” he said. “It’s even convertible.” He swung the red-and-white umbrella aside, and she yelled.

“My hair,” she cried, ducking her head under her palms. “I don’t want water to touch it!”

“Sorry.” He swung the red-and-white umbrella back overhead with a sheepish grin. “Just wanted to show you.”

They stopped in front of Amapiano Hostel. “I live here,” he said. “Where are you going?”

She pointed down the street. “Golden Castle, just branching off Miracle Junction.”

“Can you drive?” She looked at him oddly but caught on when he passed the umbrella to her. “Here. Don’t bash it up.”

“Hey, thanks!”

“Meet me tomorrow at that bus stop to give it back.” She nodded. “How’s 6 pm?”

“Deal,” she smiled, passing the red-and-white umbrella to her left to shake his hand. With his hand in hers, she said: “Do you get the feeling that something is different?”

“Eh?”

“I don’t know if it’s the weather. It sha feels like something is off.”

He ran until he got under the eaves of Amapiano Hostel, and he turned and waved at her. By 6:15 the next day, she was waiting at the bus stop with the red-and-white umbrella held rifle-like over her shoulder. She grinned when she saw him, and they went to Cheta’s Food Spot and had jollof rice, coleslaw, and Amstel Malta. Her voice was hoarse, and her nose ran. She said she catches cold quickly in wet weather and said it was all his fault for taking her out into the rain.

..…

Three days after they kissed. It was a singular first kiss.

His knees went weak, and he imagined they would melt and run fluidly together in their embrace. It was scary, and it was exciting. When their lips parted, he thought he’d never want to part with her.

...

Two months into their relationship, she was moody when he called. He asked her what it was, and she said nothing, then she said someone promised her something she had counted on but disappointed her, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it, and she said she wanted to be alone.

He said okay, hung up, and left her alone for the rest of the day. Three days later, she called just as he thought the silence was too long.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“Nothing?” he said. “How are you?”

“Where have you been since Monday?”

“At home.” He said. She was silent over the phone. “You said you wanted to be alone. I thought you would tell me when you wanted to talk.”

She remained silent. “So you didn’t even think to ask of me?”

“But you said—”

“And so?” She hung up. She did not answer the five times he called. She did not answer him when he knocked at her door the first three times. At the fourth knock, she opened the door and coldly said, “What?”

“Baby,” he said, reaching for her hand. She shrugged him off like a cloak. “Baby, I was only giving you space.”

“Is okay,” she said. She moved away and began folding away clothes.

“Look, I’m sorry.” He followed her, but she started tucking in the corner of her bed. “I swear I was about to call you.”

“Okay,” she said. He tried to engage her, reach for her, and get her to talk to him but got only monosyllables in response, and she kept her hands busy with a chore that put a physical barrier between them.

He gave up and walked out, thinking it ridiculous that he was apologizing to her when all he did was within reason. You need space and I give you space and I’m the bad guy? He thought of giving her an extra week to cool off some.

The following week, he met her at her house and said hi, and she said hi, and as they talked, he realized he was talking to someone who had made herself a stranger.

And he swallowed the past.

She was moody when he called. He asked her what it was, and she said nothing, then she said someone promised her something she had counted on but disappointed her, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it, and she said she wanted to be alone.

“Look, I don’t understand,” he said to her. “What exactly happened?”

“I said, I don’t feel like talking about it. I want to be alone.”

“‘I want to be alone’ kill you there,” he said. “Don’t tell me that nonsense. What is wrong with you.?”

“Stop shouting at me!”

“I’m not shouting at you! You are acting stupid. What do you mean you don’t want to talk to me because—” She had hung up. “God punish you!”

He rapped non-stop on her door and ignored her when she asked, “Who?”

She opened it, and he barged in. “Listen here! You got pissed off by someone else, and you want to take it out on me?”

“What’s your problem? Did I call you?”

“I called you, and you are giving me attitude? I don’t like nonsense.”

“Go away!”

He locked her wrist in a grip she could not budge. “I’m not going.”

“Leave me alone now.”

“Haha. Make me.” She tried but couldn’t.

“I’ll bite you.”

“Try it.” She arched and snapped at his wrist, but he danced out of her reach while still holding her.

“I’ll really bite you.”

“Is that how you were raised? To bite like an animal?”

By then, her struggle had turned light, and she was close to laughter as she protested. When he sensed her relax, he let go of her hand.

“Do you get a feeling that something’s different?” she asked as they went hand in hand to Cheta’s Food Spot.

“In what way?”

“I was almost sure you would ignore me, and I’d stay home and cry and gorge myself on cakes for comfort, and days later, you’ll bring your ugly face to my door, giving excuses.”

“You think I’m ugly.”

“You are a fine man.”

“But you just called me ugly.”

“Only if you hadn’t come.”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said, dropping her hand. “I want to be alone.”

Laughing, she grabbed onto his arm. “You are acting silly.”

At Cheta’s Food Spot, they had Indomie and eggs and shared a 1-litre pack of Hollandia Yoghurt that upset her stomach the whole night. This only happened when she had yogurt and cake, she told him later, and she had had no cakes.

....

There were a few other instances in that first year when something was noticeably different when he swallowed the past, though none major and most inconsequential. On her birthday, for example, when he swallowed the past to get her a set of cosmetics to replace a wig he had thought she wanted.

The thrill of his gift passed, and she said, “Do you feel like something is different?”

“How?”

“Chuka, that photocopier by the school gate saw me today and said, ‘How was my birthday yesterday? ‘Apparently, I told him yesterday was my birthday.”

He remembered she had mentioned meeting Chuka after he had given her the wig. “Is this like déjà vu?"

“Something like that. But this one seems like the déjà vu someone had about me.”

“A prophet that can see tomorrow?”

“Wow, I’ll ask him to give me the code of a winning bet slip.”

Then, he noticed the little events that seeped through when he swallowed the past as if leaking from the corner of a full mouth. However, he did not think they were anything to worry about, being nothing major and mostly inconsequential.

....

He woke up one day to her sobbing on the bed beside him with her back to him.

“What’s wrong, baby?” he said. He reached out to touch her, and she recoiled from him.

“Get away from me,” she spat. “Dirty bastard. You lousy, dirty bastard.”

She confronted him with proof from his phone of the single time he cheated since he’d been with her. He thought he’d deleted it. It might as well not have happened so trivial as the episode was, even if it was unique.

“Even look at the hog you slept with,” she said in that tightly compressed way she talked when she was emotional, compressed and thick. “What about her is special, eh? Justify yourself to me.” He could not. The girl was nothing, a nobody.

I’m sorry couldn’t quite cut it. I didn’t mean to hurt you was water on a turtle’s back. She created a solid physical and emotional distance he had to hack away at with everything before he could get through and bring them back together.

Well, not exactly everything. He did not swallow this past. There was in that event and the overcoming of it something of substance and significance between them that he did not want to lose in a swallowing. The threat of losing her peeled him open and raw. His feelings and effort in reeling her back to him was a dear expense through which he became something more, and she became something much more to him. It was a treasure for him, a diamond pressured out of the unbearably light and flaky carbon of their relationship.

After twenty-one months, in her third year, he found that she had a thing with her class rep. It floored him.

He wasn’t sure if it was only tit for tat, or if a genuine attraction developed between them, or even if that incident he knew was all there was to it, or whether that was over, or whether they were over. Now was his turn to receive a plea for pardon, to swallow scalding soup, to pick up pieces, to doubt and squint eyes at plain-looking things. A thousand doubts darted at him from blind spots, and he was continuously strained for having to wonder, a situation he was unused to. He was used to whole and spotless things.

And he swallowed the past.

He woke up one day to her sobbing on the bed beside him with her back to him. He reached across to her, and she jerked at his touch and ceased crying.

“Baby,” he said. She was stiff as he held her from the back, but she relaxed against him. “Baby, what is it?”

She only sniffed, drew her knees to her cheeks, put her face down, and hugged herself into an armadillo. “Probably think I’m being silly,” she said. “I don’t even know why I’m crying.”

He worked her tense body open and put his hand around her. “Did you have a nightmare?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I got up and was so upset that I started crying.” She turned and stared at him. “Do you feel like something is different?”

“Can you tell what it’s like at all?”

“Oh my God, I can’t say! It feels right at the tip of my tongue, but I can’t say for my life!” She leaped up from the bed and went away.

...

The slip this time was huge, and the seep much. It was not the same to swallow two months as to swallow two years. Oversized food portions digest poorly.

Because he’d displaced too much time in this swallowing, they had to move, and they moved to Calabar. There was no particular reason except that he imagined it was far enough from Awka. She began to apprentice at Mama Joy’s, a hair salon in the neighborhood they settled in.

To fill the gaps in her memory, she believed that she was an orphan in a wholly different city in the country and did not seem to have any person in her past life in her present life. She somehow pieced together a notion that her past life was not very pleasant, explaining why she forgot most of it. About her poorly retrieved past, she figured that some people’s lives were several slim exercise books, filled and archived away individually, rather than a large, continuous, easily referenced volume. There had to be people like herself. If she existed, there had to be.

She also remembered, in a hazy way that seemed partly dreamed and partly real, that she was briefly in school but could not cut it and was better at making hair. It was as if she had done hair all her life and took to it like a magnet picking filings. At the very least, it had become her lodestar, and she wove a coherent, operable life around her work and love life.

“Something strange,” she said as she placed her bag and keys on the reading table in their bedsitter apartment when she returned from work one day. “Something truly strange happened to me today.”

“Let me guess,” he said. He looked up from the book he was reading sitting on the bed. “You won some money?”

“That would be strange because I never win anything,” she said, waving a dismissive hand. “But this is different. I met someone who said she knew me in Unizik.”

He placed the book down and gaped at her. “That’s impossible.”

“She said I was in Mass Comm. She asked about my friends, Ndibe, Zitere, and Felicia, and wanted to know what’s up with me nowadays.”

“She knew someone that looked like you?”

“No, she was sure it was me,” she said. “The crazy thing is I was almost sure she knew me,” she said. “Whoever she knew in that school reminded me of me. I even felt like I knew her. Isn’t that crazy?”

He agreed that it was. And for the next few days, a phantom memory revealed itself to her every day, threatening to erode the life she knew. She said it was like looking in the mirror and looking away and looking back to find that new items had popped into view that weren’t there, and she said that definitely something was different or she was going crazy, didn’t he see?

What he saw was that he was bad for her; all those past swallowings were bad. It seemed like a house he built was falling apart, one patch of plaster after another. He was worn like a juggler tossing balls into the air to the rhythm of music. The number of balls and the tempo of the music increased, so he could not keep up with nor take a break from the exercise. He was bad for her and did not deserve her, nor did she deserve what he had done to her.

What should he do then? He should patch her up as best he can and leave her alone as undisturbed as he can manage after the fact. He did not consider, at the time, an alternative: staying together as they have become. After all, he was used to whole and spotless things.

And he swallowed the past.

The boy who swallows the past came by her, taking shelter from the rain at the bus stop. He saw her, and she saw him. He did not stop but walked on by in the rain. He heard her quick footsteps splashing after him, and as he turned, she grabbed his wrist.

“Look, I swear I’m not crazy, but something’s different, right?” she said. She pierced him with a wild and charged look. “Do you get the feeling that something is different?”

The slight rain ran down her face in beads and beaded in her cornrows. Her clothes darkened wet. He sensed the pent-up feelings in her grip, that familiar tightly rolled tension.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said, each word heavy, and he felt light with each word said, light and flimsy, as if he could be blown away. She did not let go of his hand, but the live fire in her eyes died a little, and she hung her head.

“Get out of the rain,” he said. “You’ll soon catch a cold.”

“I won’t.”

“You’ll catch a cold. I don’t have an umbrella.”

She looked up at him, sharp and alert. “A red-and-white umbrella? You have a red-and-white umbrella.”

His breath caught. It seemed as if the world stopped. And then he exhaled. “Yes, red and white.”

A grin cracked her face. “Yes,” she said and dissolved into giggles. “Yes, red and white. That’s not your convertible?”

“No, just my umbrella,” he said. “Let’s get out of the rain.” He put his arm around her shoulder, and they walked back to the bus stop.

---

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