Fugue

A story by RIGWELL ADDISON ASIEDU

It began on that Christmas Eve when my father caught me wearing makeup and scrubbed my face with ground pepper. The abrasive grains seared my skin, a thousand puncturing nails reprimanding me for my folly, and my nostrils burned as he rubbed the pepper in. He had found me applying concealer to my pimply nose. My eyes smouldered black with the eyeliner. I was still admiring myself in the mirror when he appeared behind me. Was it his shock or disgust that struck me first? How his face contorted like cracked glass about to shatter?

“So this is what you want to use your life for? Kaka, are you a girl? What are you using your sister’s makeup for?” Daddy’s hands made to unbuckle his belt, but they stopped mid-air with a familiar tremble. I knew that rage, what it could inflict on anyone close once it had possessed my father. I moved backwards until my back hit the wall.

“Oh—” my lips trembled like a lid struggling to remain atop a pot of frothing hot soup. Globules of thought broke in my throat and no words could form. Daddy was a pragmatic disciplinarian who loved to listen to us defend the motives of our actions before he punished us. Sometimes, we escaped the lashes of his belts if we could sufficiently explain the logic of our actions and our understanding of the consequences. You see, his childhood dream was to become a lawyer, but his parents wanted one of their kids to be a pastor, go into full-time ministry and bring the Levite blessings into our bloodline. He accepted the damn call even at age ten and devoured every verse of the Bible multiple times in a year. By the time he was a teenager, he was known as Walking Bible and could recite every book in a myriad of versions. For that, the leaders of Zion’s Gate Ministry took an interest in him and raised him like Prophet Samuel.

As the first son of the family, the mantle had fallen upon me to continue our pastoral lineage. My father supervised my unofficial training, making me recite entire books in versions he randomly requested. I strived hard to impress him. Seeing his lips part like a temple’s curtains after I had rattled chapters and verses was the highlight of every day. Afterwards, he would take me to Mr Biggs alone and discuss Bible commentaries and insights that I struggled to understand. He was sprinting in his vision to create a perfect family and I was always struggling to keep up, breaking up at random spots to catch my breath. Whenever I won a Bible quiz/recitation/sermon challenge, he would parade me around the church with my legs hanging down his shoulders, my hands cradling his head while he screamed, “This is my son in whom I am well pleased.”

I wanted to please him forever. It was either that or the sting of his disapproval. Whenever we did something wrong, he would shout at us in public. He even meted out that same treatment to my mother, making her squirm in the presence of church members as he told her that she was falling short of the ideal virtuous woman. Sometimes he would point out that her blouse was slipping off her shoulders or bark at her for spending too much time in banter with the church members. He wanted her to carry herself with poise and composure. He often said that the devil could use either her or the kids to ruin his ministry. And so he pruned us for perfection. What else could one ask for in a father? Yet, I failed him that day.

At that point, I wasn’t hearing the soft Christmas jingles anymore. Fireworks thundered in the sky outside Ajagungbade Street in Ketu and the air inside vibrated with the hyperarousal of shell-shocked soldiers. My ears roared with the crash of a thousand waves and there was a pounding in the walls, in the ceiling fan squeak-slicing through the air like a doomed helicopter, in the bulging forehead veins of my father who towered over me like a plane about to crash. His fingers reached for my face. I flinched. A sharp pain tore through my ears when he yanked them and drew me towards him.

“Are you a gay?” 

He placed his right hand on his chest and wheezed. 

I cleared my throat, preparing to answer even though my mind was blank. 

“I want you to open your dirty mouth and answer me. Who taught you how to practice homosexuality? Have these Nigerians led you astray? Have you forgotten where you came from? Who are you, demon that has possessed my son? Answer me, Kaka! Are you a gay?”

Even though we lived in Nigeria, my father harboured a perpetual distrust of Nigerians. His father was a petroleum engineer of great repute in Ghana, and had been transferred to Nigeria in the early 90’s to manage the administration of an oil company in Lagos. The family moved there and settled among the elites in Ikoyi. They were mostly sheltered from the brash hustle and bustle of the state. My father fell in love with my mother, a Yoruba lady, daughter of a business magnate, who was based in Osborne Foreshore Estate. At first, the two families had fought against the union: my father’s family wanted him to marry a Ghanaian and wished they had left him at a boarding school in Ghana, while my mother’s family was against the idea of their only daughter marrying a pastor.

According to family folklore, the families eventually agreed and allowed the lovebirds to create their nest across borders. However, I discovered the truth when my parents were having one of their midnight fights that usually ended in blows and crashes that made the walls shake. I pressed my ear against the door and could hear my mother weeping and coughing. In between her sobs, I heard it, my father's voice saying, 

“I sinned against God just to marry you! You convinced me that the only way your parents would allow us to get married was if I got you pregnant. It succeeded and what have I not lost because of it? God used you dirty Nigerians to punish me for my sexual sin!”

I tried not to gasp. I’d always known that my paternal grandparents had died shortly after the wedding. My father says they were robbed in Ikoyi by a group of young Igbo and Yoruba boys. His younger brother tried struggling with one of the robbers but was shot dead. After that, they killed my father’s parents and carted away their valuables. The neighbours had heard the scuffle and called the police, but it was too late by the time help came. “Nothing works in this stupid country anyway. Every evil thing resides here,” Daddy always quips when he talks about Nigeria. But he had already given his vow to the church to work as a pastor in the terrible country and he was trapped with a Nigerian wife that he equally loved and resented.

One day we got stuck in a maddening traffic jam in Lekki Phase 2 after a church convention. Daddy flew into a fit of rage as he pounded the steering wheel with his fists and cursed everyone in sight.

“All this heat, noise and stagnation. Foolish Nigerians! That’s why they are so aggressive and difficult. Every day, traffic in Lagos. Mad people!”

Mummy clicked her tongue in the front passenger seat as she tried to caution him that a Nigerian church member, Mr. Ubochi, was in the car with us. Daddy was far too gone in his outburst, snapping at the little kids who came to his window to beg for alms and screaming at hawkers who tried to advertise their wares to him.

“Get out, all of you. Who needs your stupid expired products? Fools, the whole lot of you,” he said, honking his horn for the umpteenth time. I had winced at the loud noise and clutched my trousers tight, avoiding the eyes of Mr. Ubochi. Perspiration dampened my armpits, and heat seared through my skin. I had wondered what was more unbearable— the fury of the sun slowly roasting us in these metal graves or the palpable tension in our Nissan Pathfinder Jeep that made it difficult for me to swallow.  A moment later, Mr. Ubochi asked me to open the door.

“I know I don’t have a car, but I will not sit here for this man to insult me as a Nigerian,” he had screamed. As I adjusted for him to move out of the car, he turned back, his face flushed red with the sweltering heat and indignation.

“Mummy Kaka, are you not a Nigerian? So this is how you sit down for Pastor to be insulting us all the time, abi? If he doesn’t like the country, why is he still here? What rubbish! Because I asked you to drop me, that’s why you’re running mouth insulting me and my people. Had it been you are not a pastor, you for see but God said touch not my anointed.” Mr. Ubochi slammed the door and boarded the next danfo that rode by minutes later. I averted my gaze from the people gawking at our vehicle. Mummy remained silent and dabbed her forehead with her handkerchief. We knew that would be the last time we heard from Mr. Ubochi—he would later switch to another denomination—but Daddy didn’t care. He kept muttering “stupid Nigerians” and his fingers trembled as he tried to clutch the steering wheel.

I should also mention that my father was a good man, and had always been. Whatever he did on the day he caught me with makeup on my face was my fault. I should have never touched my elder sister’s makeup kit. It’s just that it had always fascinated me, but Akua had kept it from me. Every time I asked her to practise what she had learnt from her YouTube tutorials on me, she would laugh with a dismissive flick of her right hand.

“You are not a girl. What do you need makeup for? If you had come as a girl as Mummy was expecting, things would have been different. But the three of you after me chose to come with bananas between your legs and I don’t have a sister for this,” she would say.

And so, that day when her friends persuaded her to accompany them to the salon for their Christmas hairdo, I stole into her room and started applying her makeup the way I had seen her do. It transformed me, the makeup. I felt like a movie star on a red carpet. I knew I had taken off the mask of masculinity that was never the right fit for my face. Before my father came into view in the mirror, I was imagining what our neighbour, Abayomi, would think of the look. Even before the makeup incident, I knew I had to hide what I felt for boys. That swelling in my chest that rose like the sea coming to bed the sand. I hid the flaming longing and yearned to feel something for girls.

This push and pull tore at my heart every day when I sat in church and heard Daddy preach about the dangers of sexual perversion and how the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act would usher in God’s blessings in Nigeria. When we visited our holiday home in Ghana, Daddy spoke with his politician friends, trying to convince them to follow in Nigeria’s footsteps. I would press my ear against the door and listen to his booming arguments about the animals of Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Gay. 

I wish the word only meant happy. I just wanted to be—happy.

Gay. 

The word was a hammer and a nail in my palms and feet. I was nailing Jesus to the cross whenever I thought of Abayomi and unbuckled my belt.

Gay.

And so, when Daddy asked if I was gay, it only made sense to confess my sins. I wanted him to love me. I was fourteen, weary of the fruitless peregrination of a nomad searching for a heart that could love girls, one that could love masculine things for the right reasons. I watched wrestling because of Randy Orton’s biceps and John Cena’s thighs. There was something about watching Ronaldo in action that made me wish my testicles were the balls kissing his feet. In church, I tried as much as possible to look away from the other instrumentalists. As a pastor’s son, I was expected to play at least one musical instrument. I chose the trumpet because at least I’d be blowing something to the glory of God. But Chimezie’s hands always distracted me whenever he played the drums. I wanted him to spank me that way and call me names only heavenly creatures were privy to. And Kojo Sam’s lithe fingers that moved effortlessly on the keyboard made my nipples too hard. My depraved mind imagined those fingers inside me and I would beg God to take away the demon of homosexuality.

I told my father all of this that Christmas Eve when the sky fell to earth under the attack of fireworks. Due to the holiday, relatives and church members had gathered in the large mission house in Ketu where generators barked like hungry monsters whenever there was a power outage. We would have gone to Ghana for the holidays, but Mummy was heavy with child and the long road journey would have been unfavourable with the multiple border crossings through Nigeria, Benin Republic, Togo and then Ghana. My mother had come to stand in the doorway and my two younger siblings, Farbeng and Fameye, were behind her.

“Jesus! Kaka, so this is what the devil has been using you for?” Mummy said and slapped her hands against her thighs. She had always teased me about liking the daughters of the other pastors in our church. She’d joke about becoming a mother-in-law whenever I was playing with them, and talk about the games she would play with my kids, her grandchildren. That day, I saw her clutch her protruded belly and I was scared that something would happen to the baby because of me. In the future, I believed Mummy when she blamed me for the eventual miscarriage she suffered. It happened three weeks after Christmas. I found her on the ground when Daddy stormed out after a fight. The room splayed helplessly in disarray: the bed was overturned, and splinters of a shattered table were strewn all over as though a storm had bludgeoned the house. Blood had pooled around her legs and she was whimpering. When I tried to touch her, she slapped my hands away.

“This is all your fault! I wish you were this miscarriage,” she spat. 

I still see her bloodshot eyes when I sometimes close mine. Like a setting sun casting a hex on earth before exploding into fiery embers and smouldering ashes. What greater curse is there on earth than the hatred of one’s mother, when the soul that gave you life wishes you dead?

“I don’t want to be like this anymore,” I said on that Christmas Eve, trying to clean the snot from my lips. The phlegm at the back of my hand was a hue riot. I tried not to think of rainbows then. 

I got saved that evening. Sometimes salvation comes with cruelty. Jesus had to be crucified for the greater good. My father—God bless him!—paraded me before my relatives and church members and they all jeered at me and started speaking in tongues to cast the demons out. He called our neighbour, who was also the pastor of a nearby church and the man came with Abayomi, his mentee. I tried to avert my gaze from Abayomi; his pained look was a noose around my neck and I choked with tears. He would never look at me the same way again. 

In fact, he would avoid me for years, not saying a word or returning my greetings. His behaviour shocked me because shortly after the deliverance, someone slipped a note under my door when the entire family had gone out and left me alone as another round of punishment for my grievous sin. The white paper had floated underneath the door’s sill. I heard the door of the opposite apartment close gently. The scrawl in blue ink made my temples throb in terror.

I am sorry for what happened to you. You will be fine. You have to be more careful. Everyone is watching you.

For many years, I wondered who could have sent the note. I suspected Abayomi, but his hostile attitude towards me made me nurse doubts. Whoever sent the note must have cared and that couldn’t be the crush I saw on the evening of the deliverance. When his spiritual father said they had to kick the devil out of me, the teenage boy was the first to strike my ribs with his left foot, the same foot that I had watched play football in our compound and outside on the field. His toenails dug into my flesh like the fangs of a viper and I screamed something between “please” and “stop.”

“Get out, you devil,” he spat.

My father ordered the women to bring ground pepper from the kitchen and he mixed it with his saliva.

“Jesus used his spit to make a blind man see. We are anointing this saliva with the blood of Jesus to make the evil scales of homosexuality fall from this boy’s eyes. You have to see ladies the way God wants you to. Receive healing in Jesus’ name.”

The pepper tore into my skin pores as my father rubbed it on my face. His palm scrubbed like sandpaper against my skin as he cursed the makeup I had worn. My eyes stung with a thousand needles piercing all the light in me. I fell to the ground and writhed like a snake.

“It’s happening. The demons are leaving,” a member exclaimed. The gathered saints began to clap and scream.

“Holy Ghost—” My father started, raising his belt.

“Fire!” Everyone around me echoed and the metal hook struck my flesh, made my throat raw with a scream that came from the annals of my agony. I grovelled towards my mother and clutched her legs in desperation.

“Mummy please, it is hurting me.”

She kicked me with a gasp of revulsion.

“Get behind me, you devil!” I was a repulsive alien that slithered on the ground to her now. 

“Holy Ghost—”

Darkness settled over my mind like rain clouds eating the sun yolk out of an afternoon sky. 

I regained consciousness in the shower that evening. It seemed as though my mind had powered off during the deliverance while my body remained active, but suddenly I could perceive everything in the bathroom again. The tiles gleamed with the yellow light emanating from the bulb above, and bloodied water swirled in a gargling rush around the drain. My mother’s hands moved tenderly on my skin as she cleaned me up. Tears welled up in her eyes like nimbus but refused to fall. The warmth that exuded from her touch clothed me as I shivered, and for a while I forgot that before I fainted, she had believed I was a devil that had to be kicked.

*

After the deliverance, Daddy did things to make sure I’d never be interested in men again. 

“Remember God's word,” he would say, unbuttoning his shirt when we were alone in my room. “Leviticus 18:22. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” And the sound of him unbuckling his belt would slice through the silence of the night.

He made me recite the verses too until I was a shaking leaf in a storm: “Jude 1:7:  Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. Romans 1:27: Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

My father is a good man and he did the right thing. Even those nights––he did the right thing. He wanted to show me—I turned out fine.

I turned out happy. After that day of exorcism, I wasn’t looking at men with any passion—but I was blacking out a lot. There were gaps in my memory too wide to dismiss as mere forgetfulness. And at first, I didn’t know what happened during those moments, but then strange men started approaching me with suggestive looks and comments, as though we had history. I assumed they were referring to someone who looked like me. “I have one of those faces,” I would say. I dated girls and filmed my sexual conquests to show the boys in class. I was loving the right way, and I was loved the same. 

Daddy had started laughing with me again and he stopped visiting me at night. Sometimes I missed those nights when he visited because he would always hold me gently when I was crying afterwards and tell me he was saving me from perdition because he loved me. He would lick my earlobes and caress my navel while humming until I fell asleep. I never woke up to see him there, and he never mentioned his visits during the day. Sometimes, it made me wonder if they were actually happening or just products of my overactive imagination.

That was when it began. The fugue states started that Christmas holiday; my first memory lapse was on that floor where I writhed in the salt of my father's wrath. The subsequent gaps stretched over the next few months when I woke up at night in incomplete buildings a few streets away from our house. Soon, there were periods—hours, sometimes days—that I couldn't account for no matter how much I tracked my activities and journaled events. The blank spells trailed behind me as I moved to Ghana on the cusp of adulthood for my tertiary degree. Soon, I settled in Accra as my father had designed, and those gaps widened from fissures into gullies that I tried to hide with lies and excuses.

*

I don’t understand why this is happening, why darkness settles over me like a hawk and when it lifts, a significant amount of time has passed. I am a happily married man with my wife, Gyapomaa. In the good years, I loved going everywhere with her and the triplets, Aseda, Nhyira and Ayeyi. The adulation chorused in my ears: “Your wife is so stunning!”, “Your eyes went to the best market for this woman!”, “Your kids are angels descended from heaven!”. And I would beam with the satisfaction of a hunter emerging from the forest with dead game slung over his shoulders.  

Gyapomaa and I got married shortly after my Masters at University of Ghana. We were happy; we chose to be. It was a costume we wore and it became our skin. I chose to smile everyday when I looked at her. Desire is a state of mind. I chose to look at her and want her. Sometimes, she complained that she could sense some emotional detachment whenever we were in bed but I never shirked from my matrimonial duty. It was admittedly perfunctory most of the time, but that was more of her fault. She…she didn’t like exploring, liked to keep things quiet and always insisted on us praying before and after sex. I found it unnecessary but I played along. She was my wife, and I understood compromise.

I wanted to be the perfect husband, but right now there is shame coagulating in my veins that I am in a therapy room talking about the fact that I wake up in strange places. Now I have bizarre dreams where I am involved in all manners of sexual perversion with men. And then I wake up and there is a man—or men—beside me. 

After the triplets were born, Gyapomaa began to complain about my sudden disappearances. Before then, we had inside jokes of my incessant sleepwalking and she had been helping me manage it. But she was struggling with postpartum depression. She complained about having to breastfeed the triplets and sometimes would refuse to go to them while they cried at night. I chose to work from home that period, but witnessing her yell at every inconvenience terrified me. On some nights, I woke up to see her crying for her mother who had died while she was still a child, and I wondered how strange the process of pregnancy and childbirth was to have unearthed buried grief. I wished my mother had stayed longer with us to help. I knew Gyapomaa needed me but on some days, I would just be gone. And then I would regain consciousness in very questionable positions.

One night, I woke up in a hotel room and found a man on top of me, kissing my neck. He smelled like my Dad, and something about the grey stubble on his cheeks made me run out of the room. A part of me had wanted to remain in the arms of a strange man. I thought they cast the demons out. 

Two weeks ago, I drove to my favourite cake vendor at Osu to get red velvet cake for Gyapomaa’s birthday party. A woman, thin like a straight line brought to life, crossed the road and she had the most artful makeup I had ever seen. Iridescent shades of blue and green patterns swirled on her temples, and when she moved, the sunlight animated the details of a fluttering butterfly's wings. Tiny sparkles dotted the outer corner of each eye. Her lips gleamed with a soft, petal-pink hue, and glitter dust shimmered across her cheekbones. She was glowing ether. Her face was a canvas loved by the hands of an artist. She made me hard, and in the rear-view mirror, I could see my eyes smouldering with desire. Just before my mind went blank, I remember thinking that the woman looked familiar.

I woke up in a strange place, on a man’s sofa. My eyelashes struggled to part open and my head throbbed like the pounding of a pestle against mortar. When I tried to stand, my feet slid over briefs and jockstraps. Fleeting images shuttered in my mind; of bodies tangled together in breathless passion, of sweat trickling down skin, of the smell of antiperspirant and beer. My head shook in desperate rejection of the memories. I tumbled back onto the sofa and watched the ceiling fan whirl above me. My jumbled thoughts swirled and thrashed, and my legs felt detached from the rest of my body.

“You are awake,” a baritone voice rang through the room and I looked up. It was Abayomi—bearded, chiselled, moneyed—but still that man that I had nursed abominable feelings for all those years ago. That man who had kicked the demons out of me during the Christmas Eve’s deliverance.

“Abayomi?”

“Why do you look like you are just seeing me for the first time? We’ve been fucking for days.”

“Fucking?” My head was wrapped in gauze.

“Okay, I think you drank too much yesterday. You need to sleep again,” his voice dropped into a whisper that grated at my ears. “And don’t worry, this is between us, Kenneth, as you wanted me to call you for whatever reason,” he scoffed with a limp flick of his wrist. He left a soft kiss on my lips that made me vomit.

“My name is not Kenneth,” I said and sank back into the sofa. What was happening? I thought about all those years when he had avoided me like vermin, that note that I had suspected him of sending. I had made it a mission in my adolescence to have sex with every lady I saw him wooing. I enjoyed how much it irked him, but still he refused to talk to me. In retrospect, I think I was doing it to get his attention but it never worked. He didn’t seem to care about the ladies even though I made it obvious that they were cheating on him with me. We were sharing women because we couldn’t share a bed.

But there I was, naked on his sofa with dried, peeling crusts on my cheeks and forehead.

My father tried everything; he came to me at bedtime throughout that Christmas holiday and a few months afterwards with whispers of damnation.

“My precious Kaka, do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Don't you want to be in heaven with the rest of the family? We want the best for you,” he would say, breaking into tears. The sobs always made me feel like a dirty, evil thing. I was doing this to a man who never cried. “Think about your future, Kaka. Your future is in danger if you don't obey us.”

Now, Gyapomaa has had enough of my constant disappearances. She’s moved out of the house with the kids. My life is falling apart. I am the son of a missionary in Nigeria. I’m an elder of Zion's Gate Ministry here in Ghana, but I do terrible things with men when I go dark.