On the perimeter of the 3rd Mainland Bridge, an elderly woman left Alohan behind. For weeks afterward, he wandered the outskirts, drifting along the side roads that sprouted from the bridge, astonished by what had become of him. What had Erasmus been doing with that acid? Was the stuff part of Erasmus’s photography development supplies, or was it intended for something else entirely? Why had the man failed to warn Alohan about the acid before their altercation? There would be no chance to question Erasmus now. At least Alohan was as far away from that man as possible. This was for the best. What he had lost to Erasmus could not be counted in money. One cannot attach a monetary value to body parts. Yet the loss was not as all-consuming or as absolute as losing his parents or Ivie. Still, it ran deep. To lose portions of one’s face meant a sorrow that pierced the soul. Once he had a full face, a mouth that could open at will, two functioning eyes. Those had been the days when he assumed a face should stay intact, and that a mouth or an eye would respond when commanded. Now, life had not only taken a portion of his face; it had tamén reduced him once more to a common street beggar, parading barefoot along the roads in ragged clothes, listening to the endless chatter of oka n’ube hawkers who crowded the streets. And the way these sellers talked! It was astonishing how some people could keep talking forever. Alohan longed for silence. He wandered quietly, trying with all his might to ignore the sounds surrounding him, and every moment felt a strong urge to cry.
“E don die,” a hawker declared, seated at a shedlike stand made from plywood and corrugated metal sheets. The air carried a heavy scent of roasted corn. A cluster of purple bush pears lay softened by the heat.
Two stalls away, a short, generously bosomed woman stood before a heap of tomatoes and garden eggs, her feet spread apart, adjusting an Ankara wrapper. “E don die?” she asked.
“Baba Go-Slow don pafuka—dead and gone,” the first woman replied. “Truly dead this time.”
Death, Alohan mused, was perhaps a more tolerable state than the miserable condition gripping the nation. If Baba was indeed dead, then so be it. It would suit him.
“Na so?” a lanky man asked, joining the conversation. “Sai Baba? Our very own Johnny Walker? You don’t mean it!”
“I mean it o,” the woman confirmed.
A heaven-ticket hawker approached Alohan, offering him a flyer. “Buy your salvation here! Stairway to heaven! Pure gold from God!” He brandished the remaining white sheets, waving them as he spoke. His voice carried the force of a prosperity preacher, only this time the promises would transport the buyer straight to heaven.
But how to reach heaven? Alohan wondered, pocketing the flyer without offering any money. Perhaps the flyers contained more details. If so, he wanted to read them. Yet the heaven-ticket hawker, seeking payment, snatched the paper back and strode off, shouting, “Gold tickets to heaven! Meet your heavenly father through me!”
Within minutes, a crowd gathered around the loud vendor. People in polished trousers and dress shirts, elegant gowns, shabby singlets and shorts, fathers with children, childless fathers, mothers with babies strapped to their backs, and mothers carrying infants on their hips—everyone pressed in to buy a chance at salvation.
A man in washed blue overalls, bare-chested, bought one, and to seal the gesture, pressed the ticket to his lips and kissed it.
Another man, glancing at Alohan, exclaimed, “Haba! What happened to your face?” Then, noticing the ticket in his hand, he grinned and walked away, contented.
Hunger raged in Alohan’s gut, turning it into a furnace that made his head spin. He spotted a fallen fruit beneath an ackee tree a short distance away and headed toward it. With his intact, unbandaged hand, he plucked the fruit. Its outer skin showed a yellow-orange hue, but when he flipped it to the other side, it revealed a still-green interior. Knowing the unripe form would poison him, he discarded it far from his body despite his hunger. Even though death might seem inviting, he was not prepared to meet it. He searched for another fruit. Luck was on his side, and he found one—fully ripe, a brilliant red, split open to reveal three black seeds. He brought the ripe fruit to his lips, but just as he opened to bite, he felt the painful pull around the side of his mouth and remembered the extent of his injury. His mouth would barely yawn open. A mouthful of pain. The thought of prying open his aching mouth to eat drained his appetite.
He turned back toward the crowd and saw police sirens approaching, cops whipping their batons through the air to break up the gathering.
Rain clouds began to mass overhead, heavy and gray. The air thick with the imminence of a downpour.
“Shebi you want enter heaven?” a second heaven-ticket hawker asked a police officer. “If you want to enter, release me, let me sell you your own ticket!”
A small crowd joined the hawker, shouting at the officer to let the man go. “What concern is it of yours here?” one man cried. “Aren’t we paying for our own salvation with our own money?”
The sky roared with thunder, four quick rolls that echoed like drumbeats, followed by a jagged strike of lightning across the heavens.
The police released the heaven hawker, who darted toward Alohan, only to pause and flash a smile, noting, “Salvation for you?”
A white van rolled up to the curb. The heaven hawker exchanged greetings with the driver before stepping into the vehicle.
The rain began to pour with a fury that blinded the eye.
Reflecting on it now, he suspects there was some reason for the rain. Not a benevolent one. Like with his parents, rain rarely brings good news.
What happened next is something he dreads to contemplate. It is the part he would rather erase, another moment that would alter his entire life. It is the part he would prefer to skip. Yet, when he chooses to tell his story without skipping, it begins with the blindfold.
The darkness of the blindfold settled over his eyes, a bit like the way his hands would drift into a woman’s hair, a secret transfer. And then there was motion—a scrambling, a scream torn from a mouth that could barely open, a blaze of pain ripping through his face. He wrestled with the man who restrained him, his burnt, bandaged hand and arm flailing, slapping, striking any surface in reach, trying to break free from the grip. Two ominous voices drifted nearby, hushed, muffled, filled with whispers. More pain surged through his face and then through his body.
They threw him into the back of a van. He could tell it was a van by the way he climbed in, by the hardness of its floor, by the compact press of bodies when he finally yielded to surrender.
The engine coughed to life. The sky rumbled above. The engine answered with another growl, and the sky cracked with a flash of lightning. They moved back and forth over road irregularities, a back-and-forth that felt almost like a call-and-response. Alohan felt the vehicle bounce along, the weight of strangers pressed against him, their coughing and crying and muffled, garbled speech surrounding him. Then silence fell, thick and heavy, trapped in the dark and in the rain’s persistent pelting outside.
*
Alohan still recalls the moment of drop-off, the harsh way the handler tore the blindfold away as daylight flooded the van’s back and shocked his eyes. He remembers being ushered out, then made to stand in a line of young men near a cement shack, uphill from a muddy, grassy ditch. A tall, gaunt man with a hook-shaped nose approached and began evaluating the waiting group like buyers survey a property, eyes sweeping, nostrils flaring, as if sniffing out each one.
After several minutes of appraisal, the hook-nosed man spoke. “These boys, they’re like children. What can we do with children? Who’s going to take them seriously?”
“Only training will,” the handler replied.
A row of girls could be seen climbing into a van in the distance.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, Alohan would churn over what lay ahead, questioning his own sanity, wondering if his eyes or his mind had betrayed him, or if it was all simply the work of a trick of light. Perhaps his mind, desperate for solace, conjured up once more the image of the one person who had once been his most steadfast source of comfort.
The handler and the hook-nosed man continued their negotiations as the van carrying the girls drew closer, now closer than ever, to the dirt road just a stone’s throw from where Alohan stood. Through the van’s windows, more than a dozen desolate faces of girls looked out, eyes pleading as if to say, Please, help us. The van slowed and nearly stopped as it climbed out of a ditch. In that instant, as the hook-nosed man laughed raucously at something the handler had whispered, Alohan thought he saw her: a young woman who bore the same features as the older version of the girl he had known. The two cornrows around her head—only this time, the cornrows were woven from locks. And the mole above her upper lip, perfectly round, looked just like Ivie’s when she had still lived.
Alohan gasped, trying to rush forward, but his legs buckled from fatigue and hunger. He dropped to the uneven ground. He pleaded with the hook-nosed man, “Oga, I dey beg you, please, na where—”
If the man could tell him where this place was, or where that van was taking the young women, he would be grateful. But before Alohan could finish the question, the man snapped, “If you open your mouth again, I go cover your jaw with a slap!”
Then they all trailed toward the cement shack, one after another, lining up behind each other.
The witch-doctor peeking from his shack, wrapped in a single piece of fabric over his chest, received them one by one. When Alohan’s turn came, the old man’s chalk-white face made him feel as though a specter stood before him.
Inside the shack, roosters and hens squawked. A bucket of dead birds sat near the witch doctor’s stool. The doctor guided Alohan toward the bucket, dipped his fingers into it with their old, veined hands, plucked one of the hens, leaving crimson trails across the earthen floor. To this day, Alohan cannot forget the red-stained hands of the old man, gleaming in the unlit darkness of that shack. Besides the van carrying his sister, this memory remains perhaps the strongest of that period and place. He does not remember the oaths or the proverbs the witch doctor made him recite; he cannot recall which toenail the man clipped or which portion of his hair the doctor removed. He only remembers scheming to vow not to betray any of his superiors, and the fear of what punishment might befall him and his family if he failed. What form might that punishment take? He cannot recall. His mind had, instead, fixated on the image of Ivie’s face as it appeared in the car window. Yet, given how exhausted he was, perhaps his mind had conjured that image to comfort him. Or perhaps it was simply the sign of a mind overwhelmed by fatigue and pain. Maybe it was a message that should have warned him away from taking the oath. Perhaps he should never have sworn it after seeing her image, or after catching even a glimpse of her—an echo of Ivie. Ivie was gone, after all. Still, he probably should have sabotaged the oath. Maybe Ava’s accusation was part of some juju punishment. Maybe it would all have been avoided if he had refused the oath. But there had been no real choice.
His third strongest memory from that period is of being ushered into another vehicle, this time a 4Runner, with the driver at the wheel as the young men were brought inside once more. It must have been early evening when the 4Runner surged through the roads, and in the distant horizon he glimpsed the red-tiled roof of the Oba’s palace, crowned by hundreds of bats bursting into flight as the sun set. For a fleeting moment he recognized—indeed he knew—that he was in Edo, his home. How had he failed to recognize it at first? Homes evolve with time and age, or perhaps his mind had grown too damaged to remember.
The road ahead stretched toward the horizon, the sun left like a halo around the silhouettes of trees.
__________________________________
From This Impossible Life by Chinelo Okparanta. Used with permission of the publisher, Mariner Books. Copyright © 2026 by Chinelo Okparanta.
